A History of Today, September 11, 2023

Can we learn from history?

None of my current college students are old enough to remember 9/11.  While they might remember Barack Obama’s election in 2008, the events of September 11, 2001 are the kind of history for which there is no personal emotion unless there is a personal connection.  The scenes of that day, on television and then repeated ad nauseum for weeks and months, conveyed the horror vividly and we now recall those feelings in yearly commemorations.  We who lived through 9/11 as adults know we are having a very different kind of experience than those for whom this is history. 

Such a disparity between our experiences and these young adults invites that sense of superiority that usually follows from the belief that because you had these experiences---the been there, done that, and been through that--- you know what they could never know.  I am sure if you were an adult on 9/11 you also remember the confusion, the anxiety, the uncertainty, how we had to explain something about this to our children while trying to hold ourselves together, wondering what might happen next.  We saw the president and others attempt heedful and inspiring responses knowing full well it was more façade than fact. At least some of us thought that.

Of course, we had no idea of what we know now or how our leaders would respond to it all.  I confess that while walking out of classes that incredibly beautiful Tuesday morning, I felt a palpable dread, a foreboding that our American response would lead to further political disaster.  I was not among those who thought our current leaders were particularly well-equipped to make any such difficult decisions, much less the kind that would lead us to deft, judicious, appropriate response.  My own sense of patriotism and cynicism notwithstanding, presaged more calamity and tragedy, not only at the hands of enemies but by well-meaning but artless, misguided politicians.  The rest, as we say, is history.

I’m not suggesting I was a picture of prudence or sagacity.  I felt the heat.  I wanted to get the bastards as much as anyone. But it seemed perfectly clear we were going to make a mess of it: how could we expect it not to unravel into further tribulation given who was going to make these decisions for us?  Would the who of leadership really have made the difference? I’m not sure, even now. The emotional certainty I felt for the coming misadventure was nearly as distressing as the whole wretched cataclysm right before our eyes.

Some 20 plus years later I think my current students who share none of this emotive discord are in a far better place to understand America’s 9/11 history than we are who lived it.  Our own personal traumas are largely sequestered into the barrows of memory, reawakened once a year and otherwise surrounded by toxic motes dissociating us from recollection.  But these young people have before them a real opportunity.  For them 9/11 is on newsreels and perhaps in a class where they can study more than the politics—-where the humanity of these events comes through.

By not having been there, they might apply a different sort of empowering perspective: they can learn from history as witness to the still living witnesses.  What we are cursed to feel in ways that invariably distort our judgments and comprehension, they can take up with sensitivity and analysis that might prepare them for their own 9/11.  Living memory needs historical memory to learn more about how we act and are likely to react.

Perhaps only history can offer this deeper penetration of human nature and perhaps it is from history we can learn better how to respond and reflect. How we felt and what we feel now should remind us how vulnerable we are to misjudgment when we can’t forge perspective.   I hope the students take up these tasks.  Studying history will not relieve us of the traumas we have endured but it can offer a vision of the future that invites a wholly different kind of response. Well, maybe.

My less sanguine self must entertain the possibility that history’s lesson is the sobering vision of Hegal.  “The only thing that we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history.”  Perhaps there is nothing we can do but hope we have put in place ways to cope, to address the kinds of human tragedy and trauma that teach us how little we ever do learn from history.  Must Hegel be right?  We’d be wise to have a real conversation about that now while those who lived 9/11 are still here to talk with those for whom it is only history.